SDCC: Tidbits from the Marvel Panel

Friday at Comic-Con International kicked off with a panel in one of the smaller halls that combined the different divisions of Marvel with Kevin Feige on board for Marvel Studios, Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada and Dan Buckley for Marvel Publishing and Craig Kyle there for Marvel Animation. After a couple of slides of all of Marvel’s upcoming projects and events (all which have been announced), they went right to questions from the audience. (Because this is a site about superhero movies, we will mainly focus on the questions fielded by Marvel Studios’ President of Production Kevin Feige.

Kevin Feige said that they want to hire filmmakers and get the scripts in order before casting their upcoming high-profile movies despite there being a lot of rumors and speculation going on right now.

Feige also affirmed that The Incredible Hulk lived up to their expectations and the response from the audience was generally good, and he said that the Hulk will certainly return.

When asked whether Marvel Studios might ever get some of the other characters back in order to make their own movies, he said that there were very specific contractual obligations and he didn’t think Sony or Fox would let go of Spider-Man or The X-Men anytime soon.

It certainly seems like Thor and Ant-Man will be the movies that Marvel Studios will be focusing on for the rest of the year from the way they were paired together in the slides and mentioned, but maybe that’s just this writer’s speculation. (Yeah, probably.) He wasn’t able to comment on whether Jon Favreau is officially signed to Iron Man 2 (so basically, that holding pattern continues to hold.)

Dr. Doom won’t be in the Avengers movie since he’s part of the 20th Century Fox contract with Marvel, though he couldn’t say whether he might be in future “Avengers” sequel. (Of course, this all depends on whether Marvel ever gets those characters back from Fox.)

As it’s been reported, there’s a script for a Silver Surfer movie, but Feige believes that Fox will wait and see how X-Men Origins: Wolverine does before committing.

Marvel has no plans to license out any other characters for movies that haven’t already been licensed out. (That got a big round of applause.)